Regarding the post below, a kind reader had pointed out that the State Council (which is an administrative body) couldn’t announce the new party chief in Shanghai. That one line notification came from the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, of course. Another equally kind reader (calling me an “ignorant babbling poltroon” seems a little strong) notes that Mr. Chen, former party chief, has not actually been arrested but has been placed under “double regulations” (双规) by the party while the investigation into his alleged wrong doing continues. Fair enough, but I don’t suppose we’ll see him lunching at M on the Bund soon. Rather as the police used to say in Britain that Mr. So-and-So was “helping the police with their inquiries.”
(Warning: inside baseball ahead.)
I have also fixed the link to Prof. Li’s amazingly detailed article. Interestingly, Li says that while he is a compromise candidate (pretty much everyone in Shanghai was expecting Li Yuanchao, Jiangsu party secretary and Hu protege, to get the nod) Xi is definitely not a Hu Jintao supporter and will not be. Rather, as the son of a senior party leader he is the most prominent of a group of so-called princelings forming under eminence grise and former Jian Zemin stalwart Zeng Qinghong. That casts the apointment in a different light and makes one wonder whether it isn’t a sign of weakness for the Hu-Wen Jiabao camp, which would make for an interesting few months of jockeying before the party congress in the Fall. Curioser and curioser as Sherlock Holmes would say (yes, before someone corrects me, I know it comes from Alice in Wonderland but Holmes did say it)
